The Family Blessings

The following is an excerpt of an excellent article by Dr. Gene Edward Vieth, Your Family Vocation. Originally published in the Lutheran Witness, September 2001, a publication of the LCMS.

The church was packed for the funeral of a lady in her upper 80s. She and her latehusband had had a lot of children, and here they were, along with a slew of children and great-grandchildren. Add in the spouses of everyone, plus nieces and nephews and their children, and the church was pretty much filled with family, all coming before God to thank Him for her life and to commend her back to Him.

122 Family Members

What if this woman had not happened to meet her husband back in the 1930’s? What if they had not gotten married? Half of the people in the church, from the middle-aged grandparents to the little kids squirming in the pews, would not exist.
Their union had consequences they could never have dreamed about, leading to untold numbers of new lives down through continuing new generations, untold numbers of baptisms, new marriages and new children being born.

Clearly, God had worked through this woman, along with her husband and the family they started.

Every Christian—indeed, every human being—has been called by God into a family. Our very existence came about by means of our parents, who conceived us and brought us into the world.

As Luther said, God could have populated the earth by creating each new person from the dust, as He did Adam, but instead He chose to bring forth new life through the vocation of parents.

In the Large Catechism in his discussion of the Fourth Commandment, Luther says, “God has given this walk of life, fatherhood and motherhood, a special position of honor, higher than that of any other walk of life under it.” Luther describes how it is God at work in every vocation, so that every human calling, no matter how humble, is a “mask of’ God.”

This is abundantly clear in the vocation of parenthood, through which God creates children, working through parents to nurture them, protect them, teach them how to live and bring them to faith. No wonder Christ teaches us to address God as our “Father.”

Dr. Veith wrote God at Work a very readable book for laypeople about God's calling or vocation. He currently serves as the the Provost and Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College and is a columnist for World Magazine. Most of his career was at Concordia University, Wisconsin.